


Twang

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Justified
Genre: Accents, Daddy Issues, Drunk Dialing, M/M, Set early s5-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:14:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24429316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Boyd doesn’t smile, exactly, just twists his mouth up at one corner.“What?” Raylan snaps.“Your accent’s coming back.”
Relationships: Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens
Comments: 8
Kudos: 101





	Twang

_**VOICEMAIL: JUNE 8TH, 3:09 AM** _

_Hey. It’s me. I’m at Lucky’s Bar on Leeston Street in Lexington. Damn, that’s lotta Ls. Figure I’ll be here all night, should you find yourself in the area. Wanna talk to you. Wanna talk to my buddy._

The bar below Raylan’s apartment is packed, not unusual for a Friday night in a college town. 

There’s no seats at the counter, barely room to move on the floor. When he presses his boot against the tile, it comes away sticky. He walks behind the bar to grab a beer, nodding to Casey. She replaced Lindsey on weekend shifts only a few days before, but everyone knows to just add his tab to his rent.

He finds a tight squeeze at the table farthest from the door, way in the back corner, but almost immediately realizes he can’t stand all the heat and noise, downs his drink in less than a minute. When he gets up for more, he grabs two bottles at once, drinks them standing near the fire exit. It’s not better. When he comes back again, he pulls a cheaper fifth of Jack out from under the counter and decides to call it.

“Rough night?” Casey asks, smiling as she looks at him sideways. Her hands don’t stop moving, making a watered down margarita for the college kid in front of her. She’s cute, long brown hair in a bouncing ponytail. He bets she’d come upstairs and fuck if he offered, but he’s feeling a little burned by bartenders at the moment.

“Just been having trouble sleeping,” he flashes her a grin, the one he knows makes people blush and stop looking at him too hard. “Being in here probably ain’t helping.”

He got back from Florida just a few hours before, the earliest flight of the evening landing across state lines in Nashville. He thought he was going to crash his car on the drive up to Lexington, he was so tired. But thoughts of Willa and Winona filled his head. A twisting in his stomach when he thought about how he’d promised up and down to come see them the first chance he got down there, to hold his daughter.

And he just got back on a plane without so much as a phone call. Didn’t even wait for one landing in Kentucky.

He thinks a lot about Arlo, too. Wonders if there’s any hope for someone who grew up drinking such dirty water to ever provide something clean for their own kids. 

He’s got the whiskey open and against his lips before he’s even halfway up the stairs.

Things go a little fuzzy after that. He can feel the glass bottle clacking against his teeth, but it doesn’t hurt. His mouth is numb, even as he finishes off the Jack. But sleep still isn’t coming. He just feels wired, on edge. Like the lightest touch will make him shatter.

There’s more beer in the fridge. He sways a little, going dark, and ends up back on the couch nursing one, two more. His phone is nearby. His radio, playing the back half of a baseball game he can’t seem to follow. The music downstairs, somewhat muted, rises in volume for a brief second.

Someone is opening his front door.

“Good God, Raylan. You need an ambulance?” Raylan reaches for his side, to grab his Glock and point it at the intruding voice, but his hand is clumsy now, unable to get a grip. “Stop it, you’ll shoot that pretty face.”

He blinks, hard. The shapes do not sharpen, so he tries again. Boyd clicks into view, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed over his jacket and vest. 

“‘m I in Harlan?” he asks, brows knitting together. Boyd closes the door behind him, locks it. 

“Spiritually, it sure looks like it. Physically, we’re in your apartment, Raylan.” Boyd’s boots are loud on the aged floor as he crosses the room, taking Raylan’s gun from his holster and putting it on the key table by the door. Raylan stiffens, but doesn’t fight him. “You called me.”

Raylan straightens up on the couch, feeling his fists clench. _Focus._ He tells himself. A vague recollection from an hour before plays back in his head. His phone. He was holding a phone. He meant to call Winona, ask after the baby. “Youse full of shit.”

Boyd doesn’t smile, exactly, just twists his mouth up at one corner. 

“What?” Raylan snaps.

Boyd sits down next to him, knocking knees. “Your accent’s coming back.”

He needs water, can already feel a headache blooming in his right temple. Though that might just be a symptom of being in the same room as Boyd. “Wadn’t aware it had gone anywhere.”

He hears it this time, the dropped _s._ The drawl that almost sounds like slurring. Like he’s stupid. His face gets hot.

“Oh, it surely did.” Boyd furrows his brow and tightens his jaw in what is clearly supposed to be an impression of him. “ _Deputy Raylan Givens here, listen to how careful I pronounce my Gs. Ain’t ever gonna hear me say ain’t.”_

“Stop it.” He’s been playing down his accent for so long he barely realizes he’s doing it anymore. When he was twenty-five, on his first assignment for the Marshals up in Minneapolis, the chief deputy put up both his hands and said _Son, I’m going to be straight with you; I can’t understand a word coming out of your mouth._

The man laughed as he said it, but Raylan received the message loud and clear. It’s not like he wanted to think about Harlan every time he spoke, either.

“I lived other places, it faded.” He picks up Boyd’s hand, loosely laces their fingers together before he realizes what he’s done. Boyd raises his eyebrows. Raylan hopes the heat in his face can be played off as flush from the drink. If he lets go, it’d be admitting he made a mistake.

He doesn’t fumble in front of Boyd Crowder. Hasn’t in a long, long time. 

So he doesn’t let go. Boyd’s hand is warm, calloused in the same spots his own are, if a little more severely. Boyd’s eyes drop down to his lap, before just as quickly bouncing up.

He’s made the same deal with himself. He’s not going to be flustered in front of Raylan Givens.

“You know as well as I do nothing on God’s green Earth can make you sound like you ain’t from here. Not forever.” He rubs his thumb against the back of Raylan’s palm, slowly. Testing the waters.

“Winona’s from Kentucky and she sounds like a newscaster.” Fuck, he was trying not to think about her. About their kid, about the way he fucked up with everyone he cared about. Whether he was there or not, where he dove all in or pushed them away, it was always the wrong choice.

“Winona’s from _money_ ,” Boyd says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “That don’t count, all of them sound like they’re on TV.”

The room is quiet for a minute. Raylan wants things to shift in one direction or the other. He doesn’t like getting this drunk, it makes him feel like he can’t move as quick and measured as he knows he can.

He’s very aware he and Boyd are still holding hands. He can’t remember the last time he did that with anyone. It’s kind of nice.

“In Iraq, the men in my unit used to call me Duke,” Boyd says. Raylan looks at him blankly, and that rueful half smile is back. “As is Bo and Luke Duke? As in _Of Hazzard?”_

“Oh.” Raylan considers this. “A little first thought.”

“That’s what I said!” He grins. “But there are bigger quagmires to tackle in life, so I decided not to fight it.” 

He does fight it, Raylan knows. If he didn’t care what people thought of him, he wouldn’t talk the way he did, like he’s swallowed a dictionary and a few different thesauruses. Like if he uses enough lofty, ten-dollar-words, people will forget that he’s the boy who once set a quarter acre on fire with out-of-control Roman candles and punched the sheriff who brought him in for it. 

“Here’s to bein’ white trash?” Raylan asks.

Boyd doesn’t like that phrase, Raylan can tell the way his eyes go dead for a second. He lifts Boyd’s hand to his mouth and kisses his fingers, a drunk attempt at soothing.

“Come on now, _darlin_ ’.” he’s putting it on now, kisses the delicate skin on Boyd’s inner wrist, lip brushing against the cuff of his shirt. 

Boyd closes his eyes. “What are you doing, Raylan Givens?” 

“Thought youse supposed to be _smart_.” Raylan gripped his shoulders and pushed Boyd onto his back on the couch, kissing him sloppy, open-mouthed and heated. 

Boyd kisses him back, mostly on reflex. He hooks his ankle around Raylan’s leg, a hand crunching the gel in Raylan’s hair. After a dizzying minute, he tilts his head to the side so his chin is on Raylan’s shoulder, looking up at the ceiling. 

“D’you call me so you could play at old times?” Boyd’s accent really can’t get any stronger, but his voice seems to change anyway. He sounds young. “We ain’t nineteen anymore.”

Raylan lifts his own head and looks down at him. His eyes are bright, blurry. 

“Yeah, think somebody went and told your hair ‘bout that.” He reaches out and taps Boyd’s forehead with his index finger, hard.

“Lord, take me now.” Boyd grabs him around his waist, tight enough to hurt, and heaves him up, half dragging him the few feet to his bed. “Do you have running water in this hovel you call home?”

Raylan kisses the corner of his mouth and smiles drunkenly.

Boyd searches for a glass in vain before just dumping out one of Raylan’s beer bottles and filling it with lukewarm water from the tap. When he turns around, Raylan is lying on his side, on top of his bedclothes. He holds his arm out, beckoning. 

“C’mere, boy.”

He’s always been sexy, no matter how much of the holler is in his voice. But he can tell, even under all the beer and Jack, that Boyd wants him more like this. When he sounds like the boy who got arrested for smashing mailboxes, the boy who’d sit in the back of Boyd’s truck and listen to him talk through his master plans, all the things he would do and be.

The boy who kissed Boyd, climbed on top of him, and stayed there a lot longer than he had tonight.

Boyd sets the beer bottle on the nightstand, then bends over and pulls Raylan’s boots off for him. “Take off your jacket before you pass out, you’re liable to choke yourself with it.”

“D’y’ever feel like…” Raylan sighs and rubs his face. “You fucked up real bad?”

Boyd looks up at him from under his eyebrows as he drops Raylan’s second boot to the floor. “I’ve been to prison five times, Raylan.”

Raylan actually laughs, the way he did back before it was his job not to. “I mean to say...you feel youse going off the rails and ain’t nothing you can do to stop doing it?”

Boyd sits at the foot of the bed, eyes fixed on the door. “I’ve never had much of a taste for locker room talk, Raylan. I ain’t gonna tell anyone you kissed me in your whiskey-soaked stupor.”

“Hey.” For a second he sounds more like Deputy Marshal Givens, barking at a suspect. Then he’s loose again. Just Raylan. “You kissed me back.”

Boyd doesn’t deny it. Instead, he reaches back and pets Raylan’s leg through his jeans. “You’re a stubborn son of a bitch.” He sighs. “You feel you’re missing your target, you’re gonna keep shooting until you hit it.”

Raylan turns this over. Logically, he knows how to hit it. It’s one plane ride. He’s seen men die in front of him, he’s seen women and children endure much worse. He should not be this scared of meeting his daughter, being a father.

“‘times I wish I just got started all over, be better.” He murmurs into the sheets.

After a moment, he hears two more _thunks_. Boyd takes off his own shoes and climbs on top of the comforter next to Raylan, reaching out to run a hand through his hair. It’s so absent-minded, like they do this every night, like they’ve never touched each other in anger in their lives. Like folks who’d been married since they were teenagers. 

Like they might’ve been, maybe, in another life. If they could start all over. 

Boyd lies on his side too, so they’re face-to-face. Raylan runs his hand light down the sharp lines of his cheek and chin, over his concave stomach. It’s rising and falling with his breath, maybe not as calmly as Boyd would’ve liked. Raylan presses his hand flat against the small of Boyd’s back.

“I said _c’mere_.” He pulls Boyd in, against his chest, and Boyd doesn’t fight him, slinging his leg over Raylan’s hip. He runs hot, and Raylan’s still drunk enough that he overheats almost instantly. He still hasn’t taken off his jacket. He shifts back, barely an inch.

Boyd notices. “Oh, you’re a man of contradictions, Raylan Givens.”

“You always say my whole name.” Raylan mumbles into Boyd’s ear. “You know lotta Raylans?”

Boyd doesn’t answer for what feels like a long time. The dark ceiling spins when Raylan stares up at it. 

“I love the way it sounds,” he says quietly. Like he’s admitting something. “Raylan Givens.” He kisses the bottom of Raylan’s jaw. “Raylan Givens.” Boyd shifts, rolling them flat and settling on top of him, pinning his hips between his knees. He grins, teeth glowing in the dark, and kisses Raylan on the mouth, nipping his bottom lip. “Raylan Givens.”

He sounds like moonshine and bluegrass and every stupid fight that left gunpowder in the air, and in this moment Raylan can’t think of one reason why someone would try to hide the music of a voice like that.

How simple it could be, to just be yourself, do the things you wanted to.

He wedges his hand under Boyd’s still buttoned jeans and boxers and palms his cock. Boyd exhales sharply, and presses his face into Raylan’s neck.

“You, Raylan Givens,” he says, breathing becoming uneven as Raylan begins to stroke him off in earnest. “Do not fuck everything up.”

**Author's Note:**

> i may add to this! we'll see! i drank too much chardonnay while writing this so now i'm gonna eat a burger and watch television!


End file.
